The Animal in the Room

LONGLISTED FOR THE GERALD LAMPERT MEMORIAL AWARD

Deer with binoculars, wolves with resumes: bioengineered poetry that unsettles truth, fact, and history.

Animals are strange testing grounds for thinking about subjectivity, language, the body really, anything you might want to write a poem about. Together, these poems are an evolutionary chart or a little bestiary about deer, wolves, evolution, environmental collapse, and extinction. Each one stands alone as a contained organism, but like real animals, they share some genetic material with each other. Considering PTSD and anxiety disorder as a kind of animal experience, a self-protective mechanism, these poems embody the selves we see reflected in the natural worlds creatures. Deer are a way of putting fear and trauma outside yourself, wolves a way to understand the instincts of predators.

“Oh the pleasure of inhabiting the mind of an animal like Meghan